Thursday, May 21, 2015

Tonight is the final night of TCM's disaster movie festival, looking at disasters at sea. The night kicks off with The Poseidon Adventure at 8:00 PM, but that's on DVD and a fairly well-known movie. (Just make certain you get the 1972 movie, not the remake.) A couple of tonight's films that I've blogged about before seem to have fallen out of print on DVD, as they're not available at the TCM Shop. I don't do the Watch TCM streaming audio thing since I've got limited bandwidth, so the films may be available there for a week, but in either case it's a heads-up that you don't have too long to catch these films.

I really enjoy the little-seen Juggernaut, airing at 12:15 AM, which stars Michael Caine as a munitions expert who gets called in to defuse a bomb put aboard an ocean liner and scheduled to go off while the ship is in the middle of the north Atlantic. One of the things I like about this film is that while you expect the bomb plot to be foiled, the unexpected way in which it ultimately does unravel.

The night concludes at 4:30 AM with The Last Voyage, starring Robert Stack as a passenger on a doomed luxury liner trying to get his wife (Dorothy Malone) off the ship which has caught fire. It's visually fun and entertaining, even if it's a mess at times.

And one movie which has nothing to do with the night's disaster movie lineup, Fire Over England, shows up tomorrow morning at 9:30 AM as part of a salute to its star, Laurence Olivier. I suppose that since it deals with the Spanish Armada, there is a bit of a disaster at sea, but that's not the point of why TCM is airing it.